First, what you will need:

• A knowledge of how to install pfSense – This guide assumes you have installed pfSense before. If you have not, look at the detailed instructions on the pfSense wiki.
• 1 Symantec 5420 Security Gateway – these can be found secondhand since they are discontinued
• 1 IDE HDD (Hard Drive)
• 1 computer that can boot from CD – you will not need this after the install is finished
• 1 computer with a serial port and a serial cable – this can be the same computer that you boot with but must have an OS

1. Burn a copy of the latest stable version of pfSense – I chose 1.2.3-RC3 which I have used and is quite stable.
2. Open the case of the Symantec 5420 and remove the HDD and the CF-to-IDE adapter. Put them both aside in case you want to revert to the Symantec system at some point.
3. Take a HDD that can be erased and put it in your PC – remove all other HDDs from the computer so you don’t overwrite the wrong one and set this one to Master.
4. Boot the pfSense CD and choose “Easy Install” which will give you the kernel option we need at the end.
5. After the files are copied to the hard disk, choose “Embedded Kernel” from the custom kernel choices – this will give us output to the serial port since the Symantec 5420 does not have a monitor output or keyboard inputs.
6. When the install finishes, choose reboot and wait for the computer to shut down. Before it boots again, turn the computer off and remove the HDD.
7. Install the HDD into the Symantec 5420 and ensure the jumper is set to Master.
8. Plug in your serial cable from your running PC and the Symantec 5420 serial port and begin a serial connection with PuTTY or another client program and connect using 9600 8-N-1 settings.
9. Turn on the Symantec 5420 and see the boot screen come up on your terminal window after about 15 seconds. Important: Make sure to choose boot option 2: ACPI Disabled. If it does not boot, go back and check your steps. Ensure you chose the Embedded kernel during install.
10. When the system boots, it should recognize all the hardware and then prompt you to set up the interfaces just like a normal pfSense installation.
11. This step seems to only happen if the drive was not Master in the computer it was installed in. If it doesn’t boot the first time and you get a “mountroot>” prompt it is because the name of the drive was different in the machine you installed pfSense on. As the prompt will tell you, type “?” to see a list of the possible valid partitions. You want to replace the first part (drive name) with what you see in the currently installed and possible drive partitions. If you got the message “Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad2s1a” but your valid drives all start with ad0, then type “ufs: ad0s1a“. Once the computer has booted you will need to take one more step to avoid this in future boots. You will need to edit the file /etc/fstab and change the drive reference (ad0 in the example) to be correct. You can edit this file through the web interface in pfSense or using vi or ee from the shell command prompt. Note: this tip was taken straight from the official pfSense book which I recommend buying if you are using pfSense frequently.
12. Next, to make sure it boots with ACPI disabled by default you will need to make another edit. /boot/device.hints is the file. Add a line at the bottom that says hint.acpi.0.disabled=”1″. Now when the system is booted, boot with ACPI disabled will be default.
    
    *Note that this has been reported to be unnecessary for others. I had no luck with ACPI enabled the first time I tried but that could have been related to something else.

Currently I do not know of a way to get the LCD screen functioning. There is an LCDproc package for pfSense but the driver is unknown. Hopefully this will change soon. Thanks as well to Gnuler (page in spanish – link to english) who seems to be the first record of someone trying out Linux on this box.

For some reason I couldn’t find this in the normal settings so I went to advanced under Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced. Under the General tab, click on Config Editor then type “reply” into the filter box. The entry you want is mail.identity.default.reply_on_top which was set to “0″. Set it to “1″ (true in boolean) and you’re set!

The solution was found by clem on the linux mint forum. Apparently

A grub on a separate /boot partition cannot access /etc. Known bug.

but because if it is changed it will not work if /boot is on the same partition there is no default fix for it right now. As mentioned in the post, the solution is “in menu.lst change /etc/grub/message.mint to /grub/message.mint”. Have fun!

It looks like they’ve had some packaging issues with the wrong router being sent from some suppliers but it seems they are working on it so I will soon be purchasing one of these WGR614L routers.

$ locate vmware

was enough to list quite a few files which was encouraging. I eventually found the vmware-tools in /usr/bin directory. I then ran the vmware-toolbox program and the first option I saw was “Time synchronization”. Exactly what I wanted. Now when i receive alerts about the network, the time will actually be correct. And my OCD is satiated as well.

Now I had read about issues with the new WordPress 2.5 gallery upload feature that now uses Flash. Most of those issues seemed to be caused by permissions and plugins though; server-side issues. My problems are not at the server as a Windows based computer seems to work just fine. At home I am still running Linux Mint which I have run since about December. I updated to the latest Flash 10 build and I still had the same issue.

The problem for me was I would get the screen to select files to upload but as soon as I selected one or more and clicked ok, the browser (Firefox 2.0.14) would stop responding and eventually I would have to kill the process. I finally dug around on the WordPress forums and found something relating to this issue on a tracker from the days of the Release Candidate 2.5 version. Apparently someone made a plugin to disable the flash part of the uploading process. That is the solution for me. The fact that it took me so long to find the solution because there are so many other issues with the Flash Uploader is quite disturbing. The discussion on the bug tracker is also of interest because it seems the developers did not want to include a setting to turn off the Flash Uploader because it might make people think they didn’t have confidence in it working. Well if it doesn’t work in quite a few cases then I don’t see why you would have confidence in it!

Ok, so now I can upload photos so I can finally get around to putting up some of my trip to Singapore in April.

Hmmm, I’d seen this before but couldn’t remember why. I searched online and found references to the routing table being configured incorrectly. I played around with mine but just ended up messing things up because it was already looking good. So then I took the same network cable and plugged it back into my first xbox which I have been using for months now. I could ping it. Plug it back into the second and it can get to the internet to download new skins for the dashboard. Hmmm what is the problem? I SSHed into one of my servers and pinged it from there successfully. Something between my laptop and the xbox.

I finally started looking at some of the settings on my wireless access point to see if something in there could possibly be messing me up. After trying some settings that I really didn’t expect to work I blindly clicked my way into the page that restricts computers on the network. I’d completely forgotten about it. See — I used to have this access point acting as my router so I had it restrict people from being on my network by MAC address. This meant that if a friend came over I would have to enter their MAC address before they could gain access. The thinking is even if they got past my wireless security code, the access point would not let them access the network because their MAC address did not match one on the list. Just one more step to throw off casual wireless snoopers.

When I moved to using IPCop for my router I just turned off the routing features of the access point and used it for a simple access point to the rest of my network from my laptop. The only thing is any computer that I want to connect to via wireless now has to be added to the MAC address filter. Since the access point is not between any of the computers on the network but mine it won’t affect any non-wireless computers (i.e. my servers) but will still affect me. Sometimes it’s the little things you forget.

I do end up learning something from these things. This time I decided to fire up tcpdump to see what was happening when my computer asked the network for the address I knew existed. It still took me a while but now I am not afraid to use tcpdump again for any future problems.

Now I’m sure others have written scripts and I could probably have just used the clock on the computer but I decided it couldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to write a script to do this. I knew that I basically had to just create a loop that would print a number increasing by one and then wait one second and repeat. I just had to find the right commands. About 10 to 15 minutes of searching later and I had this:

#!/bin/bash
#A very basic time counting script.
#init value of x
x=1
#make y 1 less than x
y=$((x-1))
echo "Counting from $y..." #Output what number we are beginning from
while [ $x -ge 0 ] #While $x is >= 0 (all the time)
do
sleep 1 #Wait one second
echo $x #Echo value of $x
x=$((x+1)) #Increase $x by 1
done


Some of the methods are a little different from what I am used to. To increase $x by 1, I am used to $x++. Bash is different I guess. There may be simpler ways to do this as well. If so, please leave a comment as I’m hopeful to learn.

Sample output:

$ ./count.sh
Counting from 0...
1
2
3
4
5

Also note this script will continue to run until the user types the escape sequence ‘Ctrl+C‘.

Some sources used to find what I needed:

• http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-pause-command.html – Actually found the sleep command in the comments. Excellent site!

http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/182/1/